India, April 14 -- What led you to write The Sensual Self , your new book on love, romance and sex?

What readers take away in the process of reading the book and understanding it is partly because of their own attitude towards sensuality, and how keenly they are in touch with it or not. Sometimes a book like this can remind you that it is worth reconnecting to a former self, which is how I felt when I was writing it. There were many aspects of my life that I had taken for granted, become lazy about, and was actively missing. This book is an outcome of that search.

On a slightly different note, several years ago, Khushwant Singh and I had co-edited an anthology called Uncertain Liaisons: Sex, Strife and Together in Urban India. It was an...